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OK, so now he doesn't owe me -- or anyone else -- anything.The requisite dumbshow in Florida today closed the books on the Tiger Woods story as far as I'm concerned. Was some of it sincere? Undoubtedly. Was some of it pure spin? Obviously. Was some of it flatly weird? A startling amount of it. (Does anyone honestly believe that he wasn't just as much of a hound back where he was a practicing Buddhist? That it was only when he began to drink from the various lubricious and irreligious chalices available to celebrities that he strayed from The Path?) But, as the weeks go by, and the various noisemakers in the opinion media make another four-course meal out of him, bear in mind that, if you were truly disappointed by the hash he's made of his life, then you're the sap.

(And if you're going to make sport of all the Buddhist stuff, you should remember that Brit Hume got on Mr. Murdoch's fake news channel and suggested that, only by dumping the faith of his mother, and adopting the splinter of Christianity that elects pious dopes to Congress, could Tiger be saved. I'd be frosted, too.)

I'm not naive enough to believe that the story is over, or even that we've come to the end of its beginning. (Although it was fascinating that ESPN -- in the persons of Andy North and Rick Reilly -- seemed transported halfway to Damascus by what was as calculated a public statement as anyone ever has heard.) Publicly, anyway, this is now all about saving what's left of the brand, and that's a terribly hard task for him to undertake, one devoid of even the slightest purchase on the public's empathy. But it's all he has left.